[citroeniste]

Reading MacDEF's most recent round of passionate Firewire/iPod advocacy, I thought of a next step. A "docking port" within a laptop for the MP3 player. That way, no dumb cables to carry, no extra boxes to carry when going through airports, and no loss of functionality to people who have the player and not the laptop. When not using the computer (or when wanting to use the computer's battery), just take the thing out and use it separately.

If Apple did that, I would probably pay 5 grand US for it. After all, that's still less than the 13.3" screen Dell P233-MMX that I'm now using cost me when I bought it in 1997...

 

[jpelg]

Check out the 9000 series of Asus laptops. They include a 64meg MP3 module (yes, paltry I know) that docks inside the laptop. The T9400 includes a 1Ghz PIII, 128M RAM (exp to 384), all the usual ports including 10/100 Ethernet, plus Firewire, and an external CD-RW. It retails for ~$2000 US.* Not too bad.

Their international website is:

http://www.asus.com/


*(These specs may have even improved over the past couple of months).

 

[aeberbach]

A good compromise would be a MP3 player that allows you to eject a PCMCIA hard drive. The Toshiba drives go up to 20G now, which is almost enough. Such a player would also be able to use a standard compact flash card housed in a PCMCIA adapter.

But I still say the laptop drives are a better deal and not too big. Firewire is good enough - I don't even care much about the USB speed on my PJB, it's not like you load music on it every day when it's big enough to hold every CD you own.

I hope the Headroom people are reading this.

 

[MacDEF]

What about a removeable drive bay? Pop out the CD drive, pop in the MP3 player